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2006-09-01 - 9:22 p.m. I'm finally starting to unwind from work. This morning, it was one of those crisp, fresh early-autumn mornings, I was thinking that I'd missed my calling as a farm wife. On a morning like today all I want to do is make soup or bake pies or harvest fruit or work in the garden or something. All I really want to do is work hard at something to do with getting ready for winter and at the end of the day to be pleasantly tired and have things accomplished. Instead I went to work. I started out the day by thinking that I could work a full day every day of the long weekend and I might possibly be where I needed to be by Tuesday morning. (I've been working over-time all week.) By afternoon I was acutely nauseated from stress. As an aside, I'm not sure why stress is taking me this way recently. I attribute part of it to working with people who don't handle stress well. If you are surrounded by people having panic attacks or crying or yelling or going shopping as a way of coping, it is bound to rub off on you sooner or later. Whatever. I need to learn to cope better because the nausea is really getting to me. One thing that really got me today is that back in February or March I made a database for one of the analysts. I gave it to him; I said, I've never done this before, please give me some feedback. Are there any areas I've missed? Any sections that need more? Look at it; let me know." I asked him regularly for several weeks and then I stopped. He never said anything so I thought it was fine. You know where this story is going. Today, literally days before the report is due, he suddenly looks at the database and starts saying to me, in a high squeaky voice, why didn't you do this? why didn't you do that? Can you do this now? Because in one of the busiest weeks I've ever lived through I need this? By the third or fourth squeaky voiced demand I went into his office and shut the door and said very firmly that I had asked for feedback months ago and that it wasn't my fault if he didn't provide it and didn't like the result now. I still have to do the stuff - obviously - but hopefully he'll be a little more timely with feedback in the future. Anyway, back to the nausea. It got so bad by mid-afternoon that I went to my boss and said that we needed to talk about my work load. We went through it item by item and she took away a project that requires days of work right away. Well, not "took away", gave me permission to ignore it until next week. She said the client had initially stalled until the whole thing was late and that we could just as well do it over this month and survey next month. It made a huge difference. My work load is still going to be huge this next week, but by working really hard I'll be able to do it. It's not a complete impossibility anymore. And I don't think I will have to go in this weekend and I so didn't want to. I just would like -tonight- to get to a place where I was starting to think about my own stuff again. I have a list of work things to do next week that I just keep adding to as they occur to me. I'm obviously not finished with work until my brain has stopped spitting up this stuff. Oh, and I need to write myself a blurb this weekend highlighting my experience with a certain type of project so I can be put on the project team for a proposal. I'd rather stick pencils in my eyes. "Ms. VQ has considerable experience in administering surveys to helpless squirming victims of government handouts. During her tenure as project manager on XYZ she consistently urged on her hand-picked team of talented surveyors to rousing 60% response rates." Sniff. I'm the one that still has to think carefully to figure out the difference between quantitative and qualitative research and who has only the haziest sense of the difference between formative and summative evaluations. I’ve often wished there was a Research for Dummies that I could read. I honestly feel like such a fraud when I speak the jargon of research. I caught myself today speaking of sample sizes or something and how it related to something else and I could hear a voice in my head saying sarcastically, "you're talking about that as if you know what you're talking about." I mean, I did (mostly) know what I was talking about, but it still doesn't make it feel like something that relates to me at all. Research is interesting, but I don't think it will ever be home to me. Still, it's good experience and that's what I keep telling myself.
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